Wellbeing & Pastoral Support
Wellbeing & Pastoral Support
We pride ourselves on providing excellent wellbeing and pastoral support for our children at Lightwater Village School and Nursery. Here are some of the things we provide to support our children to flourish and thrive.
Mental Health Support in School
If you have concerns about your child's mental health and wellbeing (and it is not an emergency), please talk to your child's class teacher in the first instance. From there, we will be able to direct you to appropriate support or offer provision in school.
Please take some time to read about the array of provision we offer below.
At Lightwater Village School, we have a three-tiered graduated approach to support children’s mental health and wellbeing.
Universal support:
Most children flourish under our universal provision. This includes class discussions, assemblies, PSHE lessons, using Zones of Regulation and extra-curricular provision. For pupils who need extra support, a concern is raised, and additional interventions will be considered.
Zones of Regulation
The Zones of Regulation is a comprehensive, research-based framework that builds emotional and behavioural regulation skills through a lens of inclusion, accessibility, and science.
Grounded in cognitive behavioural theory and designed with real-world application in mind, The Zones gives learners of all ages — and their support networks — a common language and set of tools for understanding and managing emotions.
The framework offers a visual, color-coded system for recognizing states of alertness and emotion, and practical strategies for self-regulation and sensory processing.
Targeted support:
Thrive
Support for mental health and wellbeing in schools | The Thrive Approach
Thrive has been working with schools, settings and organisations to support the mental health and wellbeing of children and young people. Thrive equips educators with training, resources and an award-winning online tool, so they can better understand children and young people’s needs and provide targeted, effective support. With its focus on building secure relationships and providing positive experiences, Thrive helps young people to feel safe, supported and ready to learn and building positive relationships.
The connections children and young people have with the adults around them are key to their social and emotional development. Thrive activities focus on providing positive experiences and building trusting relationships.
This helps young people to:
• Feel good about themselves and know that they matter
• Feel safe and secure in school
• Improve their emotional wellbeing
• Improve their capacity to be creative and curious
• Build their self-esteem and confidence to learn
• Recognise and manage their feelings
• Think before behaving in a certain way...and much more!
How does it work?
Thrive equips educators with strategies and activities to help build young people’s social and emotional skills, as well as develop their ability to manage stress and take on life’s ups and downs.
The Approach is underpinned by neuroscience, attachment theory and child development research and is suitable for children and young people aged 0-25 years.
What difference does Thrive make?
Schools that have adopted the Thrive Approach have reported many benefits. These include calmer classrooms with fewer disruptions, improved attendance, reduced exclusions and higher achievements.
How will my child be involved in Thrive?
Your child will be profiled using Thrive-Online, an award-winning tool used to measure and monitor social and emotional development. Thrive-Online has behaviour and skills surveys that help staff to see where young people are in their development and identify any pupils who could benefit from additional support.
Thrive-Online profiling will be led by school practitioners who will:
• Assess classes, groups and individuals to see where they are in their social and emotional development
• Create targeted action plans to help pupils to manage their behaviour, build emotional resilience and become more open to learning
• Measure and report on progress over time
ELSA
ELSA Network – Emotional Literacy Support Assistants
The ELSA (Emotional Literacy Support Assistant) intervention was originally developed by Sheila Burton, Educational Psychologist. It was designed to build the capacity of schools to support the emotional needs of their pupils from within their own resources. This is achieved by training teaching assistants to develop and deliver individualised support programmes to meet the emotional needs of children and teenagers in their care. It recognises that children learn better and are happier in school if their emotional needs are also addressed.
ELSA is an initiative developed and supported by educational psychologists, who apply their professional knowledge of children’s social and emotional development to areas of need experienced by pupils. They provide on-going professional supervision to help maintain high quality in the work undertaken by ELSAs, thereby helping to ensure safe practice for ELSAs and pupils alike.
Lego Therapy
LEGO-Based Therapy is a social development program that uses LEGO activities to support the development of a wide range of social skills within a group setting.
Playing with LEGO in a therapy setting promotes social interaction, turn-taking skills, sharing, collaborative problem-solving and the learning of concepts. It can be used to target goals around social skills, language and motor skills. By using a commonly adored tool like LEGO it capitalises on its existing motivation and supports self-esteem by allowing the participants to demonstrate their skills in a social situation. It also sets up a positive opportunity for guided social problem-solving to help develop social skills that can then be used in other situations.
Lego Therapy can:
- Improve motivation to initiate social contact with peers
- Improve ability to sustain interaction with peers
- Support with learning turn taking in relation to social interaction
- Teach skills and how to use them in a classroom and unstructured social time
Specialist support:
Sometimes children may need a more tailored approach to meet their needs. Where appropriate, the SENCo the Inclusion Team will refer to an external agency, such as Mindworks.
Please see below for a link to our Wellbeing Offer
Please find some useful websites that you may find useful to support your child’s mental health at home.
Mental wellbeing | Healthy Surrey
Mental Health Awareness Week | Mental Health Foundation
Please also take a look at our Inclusion & SEND Page
